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I'm looking to buy somewhere around 10TB of physical storage for personal use. Ideally it would come in the form of a single HDD array or network storage. I don't have any experience with RAID, but it looks like a RAID 1 setup would give me the redundancy that I want. I found an HDD enclosure on Newegg that looks like it might work for me. What are some of my other options for managing this much storage (with redundancy in case of disk failure)?

edit 1: By suggestion, I will be looking for a RAID 5 solution rather than RAID 1. It will give me the redundancy that I need using less drives.

I feel that I should clear up exactly what I'm looking for:

  • 8+TB of storage space (preferably in one array)
  • Redundancy in case of disk failure
  • Used for backups and long-term (regularly accessed) storage
  • Low(ish) price: This is for personal use, so I'd rather not pay for any extra features.
sgtFloyd
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5 Answers5

6

You need a NAS. Check the QNAP ones, the ones with 6 or 8 disk bays should do the trick for you.

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RAID1 requires twice the capacity. You'd better go with RAID5: 5 x 2 Tb disks + 1 x 1 Tb for parity check.

Gareth
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Snark
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3

You're looking for a DroboPro, made by Data Robotics Inc. It uses BeyondRAID, a RAID implementation.

DroboPro

The DroboPro accepts up to 8 SATA hard disks for up to 16TB of storage at the time of this writing.

The DroboPro has three interface options:

iSCSI (utilizes Gigabit Ethernet)
FireWire 800
Hi-Speed USB 2.0

The DroboPro can be rack mounted, but it fits nicely on a desk, as it measures 12.17" x 5.46" x 14.1".

Gareth
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eleven81
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1

How about a barebone server with 5 HDD's and then putting some FreeNAS/-BSD and ZFS on top of that? Don't know how that'll cope with this setup, since the 5th HDD isn't included in the built in RAID 5 of the device. Seems the price jumps quite a bit after you want more than 4 HDD in a single array. The built in snapshot's are nice with ZFS also, of course. This is what I've been appreciating the most after some small scale experiments.

Jonas G
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0

Granted this will only go to 8Gb, but I have a friend that has been using two of them for almost a year with speed approaching that of his internal SCSI drives. I thought he said it supported RAID. Though he uses his for storage and backup so uses JBOD. External SATA enclosure.

Dennis
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0

I have a Thecus N7700 and I've been quite happy with it. It's 7-bay, and I currently have it running with 4 2 TB drives in RAID-5, which give me 6 TB usable space.

It supports all the buzzwords: iSCSI, Gig-E, Link Aggregation, RAID Migration, sharing external USB drives and printers, Status LCD etc... It also supports a boatload of raid options and filesystems (I'm using XFS, personally).

Probably the biggest advantage is that it's only $900. You're not going to do much better than that for a dedicated NAS. Also, if you like to hack on linux, you can add modules to give you SSH access (It's runs busybox).

Fake Name
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